Houston Grand Opera Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers to Transition to Music Director Emeritus Role with the Company
HOUSTON—October 9, 2024—Longtime Houston Grand Opera (HGO) Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers, who joined company leadership more than 25 years ago, has announced that he will step down as artistic and music director in spring 2026. As reported by the New York Times, at the close of the 2025-26 season, Summers will transition to the role of music director emeritus and holder of the Robert and Jane Cizik Music Director Emeritus Chair.
“Patrick Summers’s impact on this company, and opera as an American art form, is awe-inspiring,” says HGO General Director and CEO Khori Dastoor. “He has worked closely with leading composers to introduce groundbreaking new works, mentored some of the most prominent names in opera, and guided the HGO Orchestra from its infancy into the exceptional ensemble it is today. Maestro Summers has always been a forward-looking leader. He’s also been such a gracious and supportive partner to me as we’ve ushered in a new era at this company. My gratitude to him is immeasurable. I am delighted he will be continuing as my trusted colleague.”
“Since David Gockley first spoke to me almost three decades ago about coming to HGO, when I was a shy and ambitious young conductor in my thirties, to this current moment of Khori Dastoor’s early tenure, during which I will bring my long service as music director to a close, I can only say that it has been the privilege of a lifetime to be a part of this extraordinary company,” says Summers. “Houston Grand Opera is a blessed place, and I am enormously grateful for the long honor of leading our own treasured orchestra and making art with both our resident ensembles, who are our heart and soul, while guiding the artistic direction of this great company. That my tenure stretches from David to Khori will always mean the world to me. I thank everyone so deeply.”
During HGO’s 2024-25 season, audiences will have the opportunity to experience Summers conducting two mainstage operas: the company’s new production of Verdi’s Il trovatore and its regional premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves. Il trovatore, the 89th production Summers will conduct for HGO, opens the new season on October 18. Breaking the Waves will be presented next spring. The productions Summers will conduct during his final season as artistic and music director will be announced in March 2025.
In his new position as HGO’s music director emeritus, Summers will continue to serve the company as a valued advisor, scholar, and guest conductor while maintaining close relationships with company members and supporters. As he prepares for the next stage of his relationship with HGO, the company also will be looking to the future, launching an international search for its next music director.
“HGO will need a dynamic new leader to join me in guiding the company into its next era,” says Dastoor. “We’re grateful to have the opportunity to make an investment in our incredibly important next musical chapter. We’ll be launching a global search for a music director possessed of the artistry, vision, and ambition to help push this storied company forward, as both a guiding force within the American opera industry and as Houston’s flagship performing arts organization.”
Summers joined HGO as music director in 1998, recruited by then-General Director David Gockley during a period when the company’s relationship with the Houston Symphony as its primary orchestra was coming to an end. He spent the next decades growing the HGO Orchestra into an operatic powerhouse, in a league with the great operatic orchestras across the world. In 2011, Summers assumed an expanded role as the company’s artistic and music director, responsible for not only fostering excellence in its orchestra, but also for overseeing the overall artistic quality of its productions, in a dual appointment that remains a rarity in the industry. Rarer still has been the length of Summers’s tenure in his double role.
“It has been my privilege to perform with Patrick Summers more times than I can count, including some of the most important occasions in both our careers,” says soprano Renée Fleming. “Patrick is a spectacular musician and a wonderful colleague. Working with him most recently at the Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS, I have witnessed his remarkable ear for talent, his devotion to education and mentorship, and his passion for sharing the wonders of opera with the widest possible audience. I know that these qualities have powered the steady increase in the national, and international, profile of Houston Grand Opera, the elevation of its musical values to the highest rank, and the undeniable prestige of its orchestra, over the course of his more than a quarter-century with the company.”
During his tenure at HGO, Summers has championed the company’s industry-leading vision of the operatic art form as a distinctly American one. He has conducted numerous world premieres in Houston, building the repertoire through collaborations with composers including Tod Machover (Resurrection, 1999), Carlisle Floyd (Cold Sassy Tree, 2000; Prince of Players, 2016), Rachel Portman (The Little Prince, 2003), Jake Heggie (End of the Affair, 2004; Three Decembers, 2008; It’s a Wonderful Life, 2016), Christopher Theofanidis (The Refuge, 2007), André Previn (Brief Encounter, 2009), Tarik O’Regan (The Phoenix, 2019), and Joel Thompson (The Snowy Day, 2021).
Summers has had a uniquely long and close conductor-composer relationship with leading American composer Jake Heggie, dating back to their days together at San Francisco Opera. At HGO and other houses, he has conducted all of Heggie’s early premieres, from Dead Man Walking to It’s a Wonderful Life. “Patrick has the rare and magical gift of understanding a composer’s intention—not just how the music goes, but what it means,” says Heggie. “His ability to then convey that clearly to the orchestra, chorus, and cast is miraculous. This gift, combined with his infectious passion for music, has inspired me to explore many different collaborations and sound worlds. From his earliest days as a conductor, he’s sought out talent and encouraged it to blossom. I’ve seen that with singers, conductors, pianists, administrators—even a young composer working in the PR department of San Francisco Opera 30 years ago.”
Mentored himself as a young musician by Margaret Harshaw and Sir Charles Mackerras, Summers has spent much of his career mentoring others. In addition to supporting gifted young opera performers through the company’s Sarah and Ernest Butler Houston Grand Opera Studio program, he has worked closely with a host of performers cast in HGO’s mainstage productions, helping them to unlock the art form while steering them toward ever more ambitious, often unexpected, roles.
Summers has enjoyed close artistic relationships with Tamara Wilson, Joyce DiDonato, Jamie Barton, Ryan McKinny, Ailyn Pérez, Christine Goerke, Lauren Snouffer, Albina Shagimuratova, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Norman Reinhardt, Ana María Martínez, Andrea Carroll, Nadine Sierra, Patricia Racette, Susan Graham, Zheng Cao, Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, Iestyn Davies (in his U.S. debut), Jay Hunter Morris, Lawrence Brownlee, Michael Spyres, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Laura Claycomb, and many more leading artists. His collaborations with, and support of, musicians and creatives extend across disciplines, spanning from conductors such as Eun Sun Kim, Cristian Mӑcelaru, Evan Rogister, and Benjamin Manis, to stage directors such as Baz Luhrmann, Stephen Wadsworth, Jack O’Brien, Neil Armfield, James Robinson, and Lileana Blain-Cruz.
“Patrick Summers has been an extraordinary mentor and guide throughout my career. He was the first to believe in me in the challenging dramatic repertoire, and without his support, immense knowledge, and trust, I simply would not be where I am today,” says Goerke, who performed the role of Brünnhilde in three of HGO’s Ring operas. “Performing Wagner’s Ring cycle with him at Houston Grand Opera is an unforgettable highlight of my journey, again made possible by Patrick's artistry and visionary leadership. His legacy at HGO will forever be marked by these transformative experiences, and I will always be deeply grateful for his heart, soul, and unmatched musical magic.”
Among Summers’s achievements at HGO, Wagner’s four-part Ring stands out as an acclaimed tour-de-force that not only showcased the remarkable evolution of the HGO Orchestra under his baton, but also his full vision for the company’s artistic aspirations. HGO presented one opera from the cycle each year from 2014 to 2017. “Conductor Patrick Summers is, in many ways, the star of the show, drawing some unforgettable playing from the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra to rival the best symphony orchestras,” wrote Classical Voice, in a 2017 review of Götterdämmerung that called the production an “unforgettable theatrical experience.”
Summers’s time at HGO has been remarkable for both the breadth of experience and wide range of repertoire he has conducted. A career-defining production was the company’s 2014 American premiere of Weinberg’s The Passenger, both at HGO and Lincoln Center Festival. Additional highlights from Summers’s tenure at HGO include conducting Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Lohengrin; Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Elektra; Handel’s Saul and Julius Caesar; Mozart’s Idomeneo, The Abduction from the Seraglio, Don Giovanni, and The Marriage of Figaro; Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Manon Lescaut, and Turandot; Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites; Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen; Lehár’s The Merry Widow; Britten’s Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, and The Turn of the Screw; Smyth’s The Wreckers; and Kern’s Show Boat.
Summers has conducted Verdi’s La traviata three times for HGO, in productions starring Patricia Racette, Renée Fleming, and Albina Shagimuratova. He also engaged Eun Sun Kim, now the music director of San Francisco Opera, to conduct La traviata at HGO for her lauded American debut, and invited composer/conductor Matthew Aucoin to Houston for his first La traviata. Additional Verdi productions conducted by Summers at HGO include the company’s only performances of the composer’s Requiem; Don Carlo, in both the Italian and French versions; Rigoletto; A Masked Ball; Simon Boccanegra; Aida; Otello; two Falstaff productions, starring Sir Bryn Terfel and Reginald Smith, Jr.; and Il trovatore, in three productions, starring Sondra Radvanovsky, Tamara Wilson, and in fall 2024, Michael Spyres and Ailyn Pérez.
Notable HGO productions conducted by Summers that were recorded and released as albums include Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas (two different productions, starring Patricia Schumann and Ana María Martínez), Floyd’s Of Mice and Men, and Heggie’s Dead Man Walking. Mark Adamo’s Little Women, conducted by Summers, was recorded for PBS’s Great Performances.
As Summers transitions to the role of HGO’s music director emeritus, he plans to continue guest conductor engagements while serving in his current post, alongside Renée Fleming, as co-director of the Aspen Music Festival and School’s Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS, which the two have led since 2019. He will continue teaching at the Rice University Shepherd School of Music, where in August 2024 he was named a distinguished lecturer in opera studies. He will also continue to publish his writing; in addition to penning essays on the operatic art that he shares weekly with HGO supporters, Summers is a prolific author, with five novels completed to date.
Summers began his career in opera in 1986, training as a pianist/conductor with the San Francisco Opera Merola Opera Program. He quickly became music director for SFO’s touring arm, the Western Opera Theater, before being named the music director of the SFO Center. From 1999 to 2016, he served as SFO’s principal guest conductor; succeeding his conducting mentor, Sir Charles Mackerras, and working closely with several generations of San Francisco Opera leadership, he has conducted A Streetcar Named Desire, Il trittico, Moby-Dick, Dead Man Walking, Sweeney Todd, Guillaume Tell, and many more operas, and in 2015, was honored with the San Francisco Opera Medal, the company’s highest honor.
Summers also has enjoyed long associations with Opera Australia and the Metropolitan Opera, in addition to conducting for major companies throughout the world. In 2017, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree from his alma mater, the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, acknowledging distinguished achievements in the field of opera, particularly as a mentor of younger artists.